Indie game 'Minecraft' tops YouTube gaming channel chart, earns gold

A cut-price PC game with basic, blocky graphics has been capturing the imaginations of gamers the world over and, thanks to the slow burn of word-of-mouth recommendations igniting into a populist frenzy,
Minecraft has become a huge cult hit even before its official release.

With most of the development work done by just one guy, Sweden's Markus Persson,
Minecraft is most definitely a commercial prospect, but the current work-in-progress version is offered at half price (€9.95) to those that buy now and fund its future development.

Concieved as a twist on classics such as the territorial defense game
Dwarf Fortress,
Dungeon Keeper's corridor monster hunting,
RollerCoaster Tycoon, and especially influenced by the free indie game
Infiniminer, Persson's brainchild has taken off like few others.

Minecraft's curiously compulsive terrain forming is also reminiscent of
Populous, crude yet expressive graphics are like an early
Zelda or a happy
Doom level creator, and the zombie survival mode becomes a bizarre mental mish-mash of
Left 4 Dead's panicked routefinding,
Command & Conquer's resource gathering, and a hallucinatory episode based entirely on LEGO bricks and cardboard cut-outs.

Speaking to industry website Gamasutra in March 2010, Persson was pleased at having seen sales increase to 200 copies per day for a total of 6,400. Six months later, the daily figure for paid downloads is passing 10,000 and total sales are over 270,000. All that for something that's available as a free browser-based game that isn't even finished.

A minor niggle obstructing some players' exploratory progress was the lack of a comprehensive tutorial, but an enthusiastic community put that to rights with a bevy of YouTube videos and an extensive standalone Wiki.

One of them, September 27's "Building Megaobjects in Minecraft", became the most viewed gaming video for the entire week leading up to September 29. Witness it for yourself, as an intrepid player reveals his own pet project - the bare bones of Star Trek's Starship Enterprise, replicated at a magnificent and colossal 1:1 scale.